The golden anniversary of cloning: a celebratory essay

May 2002 marked the golden anniversary of the first cloned tadpoles. We celebrate this anniversary, as nuclear transplantation of frog cells into enucleated eggs became the prototype for cloning insects, fish, and mammals. We briefly review the salient results from amphibian cloning. Extension of these studies to mammalian species led to cloning adult cells, important advances in understanding nuclear reprogramming, and the construction of transgenic clones for biomedical applications. In addition, murine cloning clarified two problems unresolved in frog cloning: the unequivocal demonstration that nuclei of fully differentiated cells can direct the formation of fertile adults, and that abnormal expression of genes was responsible for the endoderm and neural syndromes in Rana clones.